Thursday, April 15, 2010

Who am I?

Alan Alda said a great thing.He said "The creative is the place where no one else has ever been.You need to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.".

When I was a child, despite the fact that I broke needle after needle, my mother would encourage me to sew. It was always a way of entering into a wonderful imaginary world. A world where I had friends who I could dress up with clothes I made them and castles created from cardboard boxes.I also grew up in a small city in New Zealand in the 1970's with a black and white TV, no DVDs, video games or the such, and my sister and I had to make our own fun.

I was fortunate to be bought up in a way where my creativity flourished, and was encouraged. But, as it is said, it is never too late to have a happy childhood, and I truly believe that everyone has a creative side to them just waiting to come out. A unique expression of them that will be both wonderful and mysterious.

I went on to study both theatre costume and clothing manufacturing, as well as attaining a degree in Fine art ( majoring in painting).

these days I fill most of my time with either teaching or making, and find the more I make, the more my creativity is fed and the more ideas I have.

I think there is a place for art, craft and general making in today's environment for a number of reasons:

- Reusing things that are discarded and remaking them into something useful and perhaps even beautiful is fantastically resourceful, and a move away from being part of the huge consumerist grid.-Making is time consuming, requires you to slow down and is a nice quiet kind of meditation- The handmade is loved by the maker (usually.. sometimes I find my creations just down right weird, then they are thrown into the "craft fail" pile to be dealt with at a later date), and usually appreciated by others too.-they are unique in a way that mass produced objects can never be.